In an undisclosed location somewhere near the triple border of Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, is something truly extraordinary: protrusions—things sticking up out of the land into the sky. You even have to tilt your head up a little bit to take a gander. That’s really something after a gabillion miles of flat stuff. In an even more undisclosed location near that is a gorgeous, windswept blue pond—ringed on one side by a row of ancient automobiles circa 1950s perhaps—embankments placed nose to tail in an unceasing prairie traffic jam. Rusting, rotting, shattered glass—a stubborn line of Detroit’s finest in spackled dull red holding the landscape together between glistening marine hues and emerald green spring grasses stretching as least as far as the Medicine Bow. Sometimes you have to go east to go west, and there’s always the chance that heading west from here is really only a circling back around again.
0 Comments
|
Chris Dunn, PhD
Researcher, writer, explorer*, photographer, thinker. Wrestling with nature, culture, technology. Archives
November 2024
Categories
All
*When I use the term "exploration", I mean it in a personal sense (discovery for myself, or at a unique moment in time [everywhere after all--even crowded cities--endlessly await rediscovery--by new eyes and in new moments]), not in an absolute sense. With few exceptions (notably Antarctica), almost everywhere on earth has had other people around for a long time (though to varying degrees - high mountain tops or places like the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet for instance were far less visited and populated, and undoubtedly at least some pockets of the earth were never visited or populated). It is an enlightening experience though when on an isolated ridge in what feels like the middle of nowhere to wonder if anyone has set foot there but never knowing for sure. What is significant is that the landscape itself is left in such a condition that it isn't evident. Some places ought to be kept that way.
|